Ranuir: A Reference Grammar

by Lexi Summer Hale

CONTROLLED INFORMATION

This document contains information whose transmission and propagation are
subject to restraint. Ensure you understand and can abide by all parameters
outlined below before you continue. If you have accessed this document in error or
without appropriate clearance, please close it now and report a security breach to the
applicable Controlling Authority.

THROUGH VIGILANCE, ETERNITY

Control Class

GREENNot for transmission to nonresidents. Internally unrestricted.

Authority

WCOShevret Enforcement Directorate

Codewords

-GENERAL ACCESS-

Notes

-INAPPLICABLE-

Chapter 1: Introduction

Ranuir is the official language of the Society of Worlds, and the only one in wide use. It is a constructed and carefully
standardized language spoken by nearly a billion souls from the frontier colonies to the hidden capital planet of Tel Casran.

Phonology

Ranuir was designed to be easily pronounceable for the Mid-Arm Tribes, from whom the Society was originally formed. It
therefore has a simple phonology with relatively few phonemes. The two major points on the dialect continuum are Core Ranuir,
spoken on Tel Casran and the Old Worlds, and Colonial Ranuir, spoken on worlds settled after the Great War, the New Worlds.

Labial

Coronal

Velar

Palatal

Glottal

Nasal

m

n

(ŋ)

Stops

p

t d

k g

Fricatives

f v

s (z)

(x ɣ)

ʃ

h

Liquids

w

ɹ l

j

In romanized text, all phonemes are represented by the same character as in the IPA representation above, with the exception of /k/ ‹c›, /w/ ‹u›, /j/ ‹i›, /ɹ/ ‹r›, /ʃ/ ‹sh›, and /ɑ/ ‹a›.

Ranuir syllables take the structure (C)V(C), that is, a vowel optionally surrounded by consonants. All vowels must be
separated by at least one consonant; there are no diphthongs and V syllables cannot occur next to each other. The sole exception is in Core Ranuir for adjacent vowels across word boundaries, which in rapid speech are pronounced with a glide or as long vowel (e.g. “…sa is…" /sɑ ‿ is/ → [sɑjis]; /sɑ ‿ us/ → [sɑwus]). In Colonial, an epenthetic glottal stop is simply inserted between the vowels.

/p b t d/ have fricative release in pausa and before other stops, unless geminate.

cete [kete]

cetgar [ket͡s̮.gɑɹ͡ɣ]

cet [ket͡s̮]

/k g/ → [(k)x (g)ɣ] at the end of words in pausa and before stops. Some speakers may generalize this to the coda position, though this is seen as a personal quirk. It is associated with gentleness and femininity, though it is evinced both men and women. Men are more likely to preserve the stop and pronounce the sound as an affricate (e.g. [kx]), while women more frequently pronounce only the fricative (e.g. [x]).

/ɹ/ is pronounced [ɹ͡ɣ]; that is, coarticulated with a voiced velar fricative. This is in free variation with [ɹˠ].

In informal speech, noun stress falls on the penultimate syllable. In formal speech, it falls on the "head" syllable (the morpheme that is being modified by another), though this feature is widely disliked and increasingly disused even the Central Worlds.

In female speech, vowels in the final syllable of polysyllabic words tend to be lengthened.

/ɹ/ is pronounced [ʐ].

Stress falls on the first syllable.

Central

Colonial

vartash

[ˈvɑɹ͡ɣ.tɑʃ]

[ˈvæʐ.tæʃ]

rantal

[ˈɹ͡ɣɑn.tɑl]

[ˈʐæn.tæl]

shevret

[ˈʃev.ɹ͡ɣet͡s̮]

[ˈʃɛv.ʐɛtʰ]

Rantashar silte rana.

Central

[ɹ͡ɣɑn.ˈtɑ.ʃɑɹ͡ɣ ˈsil.te ˈɹ͡ɣɑ.nɑ]

Colonial

[ˈʐæn.tɑ.ʃæʐ ˈsɪl.te ˈʐɑ.nɑ]

So, which accent should you use? It depends on how you want to come across. Colonial is seen as coarser; it's associated with the dangers and excitement of a frontier life. Central Ranuir is more sedate and sophisticated, though it can come across as out-of-touch or pretentious to some on the New Worlds. Cassil Tegvari, for instance, embraces her Colonial accent, while Lisuan Tegvari affects a Central accent.

Grammar

Chapter Vocabulary

le(v) to be in a state

me(v) to perform, exhibit, display (a trait, a quality)

sashe(v) to be located

assashe(v) to put, to move

ran(n) the Society as a nation, the People

uas(n) profligacy, lack of discipline, alienness

cas(n) hope

case(v) to hope

evcase(v) to demoralize, to drive to despair

sash(n) place

rantash(n) citizen of the Society

uastash(n) foreigner

sil(n) light

var(n) protection, subjugation*

vare(v) to protect, subjugate*

teg(n) mountain

eviure(v) to kill

*The metaphorical senses of var and related lexemes do not have a straightforward translation to English. Literally "shadow," var connotes much more than just "protection;" it's a form of relationship that could be characterized as "loving submission to loving authority." It implies that one party has earned the obedience of another, and that they use their authority in the best interest of the other. See vartash in the Glossary for an example.

Ranuir has free word order in matrix clauses. Subject-object-verb order is the most common, but any order is possible. Noun role is marked with cases.

The nominative case is unmarked, and codes the subject of the sentence. In English, the subject is typically the noun phrase that appears before the verb.

The accusative case is marked with the ending -a, and codes the object of the sentence. In English, this is typically final noun phrase in a clause before any prepositions.

Armed with this knowledge, let's try to translate some sentences. Note that Ranuir does not use articles — "a," "an," and "the" must be inferred for the translation.

Ran case.

The people hope.

Evcase rantash uastasha.

The citizen is driving the foreigner to despair.

Rana sil vare.

Light protects the people.

Note here that the nouns and verbs appeared in a different order in each sentence, but we can still decode the meaning from the case suffixes. This freedom of word order makes it easy to add nuance to the sentence. For instance, (3) could be more precisely translated as "It's the People who light protects." Essentially, the words appear in order of relevance.

Another important case is the genitive. This works a lot like the word "of" in English. It's marked with the suffix -i.

sil rani

the light of the People

rani cas

the People's hope

uas tegi uastashi

the profligacy of the foreigner's mountain

uastashi tegi uas

the foreigner's mountain's profligacy

As we can see, the genitive is a lot more complex than the accusative or the nominative. That's because it can appear more than once in a single constituent. This raises the question — how do we know what belongs to what?

The genitive follows a number of special rules to disambiguate these situations. The first rule is that the order in a single constituent must be consistent. So (4) above can mean only "the foreigner's mountain's profligacy," not "the mountain's foreigner's profligacy." That could only be expressed as tegi uastashi uas or uas uastashi tegi.

That's all very well and good, but constituents don't necessarily have a verb separating them! What's to stop us from saying *sil rani tegi uastasha evcase? Couldn't that mean anything from "the light of the People demoralizes the foreigner of the mountain" to "the light demoralizes the foreigner of the People's mountain"?

In fact, that phrase is ungrammatical. Ranuir requires that genitive phrases appearing next to each other take the same order. So it could only be expressed unambiguously as sil rani uastasha tegi evcase or rani sil tegi uastasha evcase, "the light of the people demoralizes the foreigner of the mountain."

This rule doesn't apply if there's a verb separating the two phrases, and sil rani evcase tegi uastasha is completely grammatical, as constituent boundaries are unambiguous. This construction and its inverse are seen as especially flowery speech patterns; they are very common in the Charter itself.

Now that that mess is out of the way, we can look at something easier and equally useful — the locative, which is formed with the suffix -it. For verbs that involve a location (such as "go" or "depart" or "be located"), the locative is used to specify that location. It is also used to indicate where an action is taking place. More abstractly, it can transform nouns into adverbs.

Rantash tegit sashe.

The citizen is at the mountain.

Silit rana vare.

In light the People are protected.

Ranit uastash uasa me.

Among the People, the foreigner exhibits profligacy.

Casit tega vare.

Hopefully the mountain is protected.

The locative, like other arguments, may be placed anywhere in a matrix clause. Its placement changes the nuance of the sentence.

But what if we have a word like assashe, which takes not only a subject and an object but potentially two locations? We can't use the locative for both because there's no way to tell which role each location places. In this case, we need the final case: the adlocative.

The adlocative, coded by the -at suffix, is used when it is necessary to disambiguate the direction of motion. In these cases, the locative specifies the point of origin, and the adlocative specifies the destination. However, in locational verbs that do not have a slot for a point of origin or place of occurence, the locative instead specifies the destination.

The adlocative has an additional use, in that it can specify the purpose for which an action takes place. In this sense, it can be used even with non-locational verbs. We'll go into more detail on this later; for now, here are some basic translation exercises.

Rantash uastasha ranit tegat assashe.

The citizen is taking the foreigner out of the Society and putting them on the mountain.

Rani varat uastasha eviure.

The foreigner is being killed for the protection of the People.

You may have noticed something odd here: in a number of cases, one of the arguments is missing. For instance, in (2) above, there is no term in the nominative case. This is because Ranuir permits you to drop arguments where they can be inferred or are not relevant. This construct seen in (2) is Ranuir's equivalent of the passive voice.

That wraps it up for the introduction. In Chapter 2, we'll discuss plural nouns, pronouns, relativization, and complementization.